Our Hospitality

Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone give Our Hospitality time to work out its jokes, and the patience mostly pays off. This is an inventive, warmly enjoyable comedy whose railway business is more satisfying than its romance. Its particular pleasure is watching a performer give a practical difficulty his complete attention, without appearing to consider how funny he might look. There is affection in the film, but getting from place to place tends to produce the better entertainment.

The period train sequence explains the appeal. We laughed at the railway journey because Buster Keaton treats its difficulties with such serious attention. He allows us to enjoy the absurdity without asking his character to acknowledge it, and the concentration makes the physical comedy feel oddly companionable. The train earns attention in its own right, rather than serving merely as transport between scenes, and the sequence benefits from being allowed to occupy so much of the film.

Gordon Jennings and Elgin Lessley make that physical business easy to follow. Their photography gives the relationship between the performer and his surroundings enough clarity for us to appreciate how carefully the comedy has been arranged. We need to understand a difficulty before we can enjoy the ingenuity of dealing with it. The images do that work without making the staging feel like a demonstration, which matters when so much of the pleasure depends on apparently spontaneous responses.

Buster Keaton’s William McKay is engaging because the physical precision never quite excludes vulnerability. The effort to cope gives us something recognisable to care about, even when the comedy becomes elaborate. Joe Roberts, as Joseph Canfield, suits the broader comic scale, while Natalie Talmadge’s Virginia Canfield feels less sharply defined. The romantic passages have warmth, but they lack the particularity of the railway business, and we sometimes find ourselves waiting for another practical problem.

Joseph A. Mitchell and Jean C. Havez’s screenplay, with a story credited to Clyde Bruckman, leaves generous room for the physical comedy. That freedom occasionally costs the storytelling some momentum: a passage can remain amusing after it has made its point. The romance needs a little more weight if it is to compete for our attention, especially alongside such resourceful comic movement. At 73 minutes, the film is short, though not every stretch feels equally necessary.

Walter J. Israel’s costume design helps the period setting feel comfortable enough for the antics to belong there. The clothes support the performances without persistently demanding separate admiration. That is useful in a film with so much carefully arranged physical business, where an overemphatic detail could make everything seem fussy. The photography and costumes share a restraint that keeps our attention on the people and their immediate difficulties.

Physical comedy asks us to pay attention to things that another kind of film might hurry past. Here, that attention is usually repaid, and there is no need to treat the humour as an exercise in appreciating film history. The pleasure is direct enough once we settle into its pace. Choose it when there is time to watch a journey properly, rather than simply wait for somebody to arrive.